How the psychology of cyberbullying explains Trump’s tweets

When President Donald Trump tweeted last week about “crazy” Mika Brzezinski “bleeding badly from a face-lift,” it was shocking but hardly surprising.

His first online barb against the MSNBC host had come at 8:20 on a Monday morning last August: “@morningmika is off the wall, a neurotic and not very bright mess!”

Since then, Trump has referred to “crazy @morningmika” at least three times; claimed she had a mental breakdown on-air; and threatened to expose the “real story” of her relationship with her co-host, Joe Scarborough. And Brzezinski is hardly alone: The president has demonstrated an unrelenting fondness for Twitter attacks against celebrities, fellow politicians and the media — most recently, and infamously, CNN.

What explains Trump’s increasingly bizarre online behavior?

Brzezinski and Scarborough have raised the possibility that the president is “unmoored,” “not well” and certainly “not mentally equipped” to watch their show.

Others have suggested he has pathologically poor impulse control. But the best insight might come, ironically, from Trump’s wife, Melania, who shortly before the election decried an internet culture that “has gotten too mean and too rough.” She was talking about cyberbullying, an online behavior she described as “absolutely unacceptable” — but which some experts say is an accurate, and helpful, descriptor of the president’s Twitter habits.

From his language to his frequency to his particularly callous targeting of women, Trump’s behavior bares many of the hallmarks of cyberbullying, according to lawyers, psychologists and others who study the subject. Understanding this conduct, they say, might explain why Trump has kept up these attacks even in the face of condemnation and might, in turn, help those around him temper his impulses.

According to Justin Patchin — a criminal justice professor at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and co-director of the CyberBullying Research Center, an online information hub about the subject — cyberbullying is defined as harm that is inflicted through technology, and is done willfully and repeatedly.

Melania Trump is right that the issue is widespread. A nationwide cyberbullying survey of 5,600 middle and high school students, published out of Florida Atlantic University earlier this year, found that 34 percent of students said they had experienced cyberbullying in their lifetime.

Technically, the term cyberbullying usually refers to teens — young adults sitting behind computer screens, nastily messaging peers things like, “You’re fat!” — so Trump, at 71, is about 55 years too old to be considered a cyberbully, says Parry Aftab, a lawyer who specializes in cyberbullying and digital privacy. But, she says, his behavior fits into other similar categories of grown-up hassling online: “flamers,” “trolls” and “cyber harassers.”

Flamers use inflammatory language and profanity in hopes of eliciting a reaction. Trolls are a bit more sophisticated, starting full-blown arguments by saying derogatory or offensive things about certain people or groups. And cyber harassers engage in those same types of behaviors but repeatedly target the same individuals. “Trump has participated, based on my observations, in all three,” Aftab says.

The 'dark triad'

How is a cyberbully born, and what drives one to keep attacking and attacking? Low self-esteem and low thresholds for empathy are good predictors, as are the “dark triad” personality traits of psychopathy, Machiavellianism and narcissism.

“Most adolescent cyberbullying is caused by some relationship problems,” Patchin adds. They might have friends who shun them, parents who ignore them, former romantic partners who spurn them. They lash out at others to assert the dominance and control they’ve lost."

There’s not one psychological explanation that applies across the board, however, says Elias Aboujaoude, a Stanford psychiatrist and co-editor of the book Mental Health in the Digital Age: Grave Dangers, Great Promise. “We all take on different personas to some degree online,” he says. And the barriers to entry are low: You usually can’t become a schoolyard bully without physical or social strength, but to be a cyberbully, all you need is a Twitter account. Individuals with naturally aggressive or hostile instincts, sometimes inhibited in face-to-face interactions, can be activated in an online setting."

In the case of adults, Patchin says, cyberbullying behavior is less about coping with personal problems, however, and more about gaining status or reputation among certain circles. “Neither kids nor adults, I don’t think, would bully another person unless they thought it would be valuable to them,” he explains.

Which leads to Trump: “If the president believed that his tweets would cause people not to vote for him, he wouldn’t do it,” Patchin says. “It’s not just that he’s not worried about political or social backlash. But, more than that, he must think it’ll benefit him in some way.”

According to several surveys, adolescent girls are more likely than boys to experience cyberbullying. In 2014, the Pew Research Center found that young women aged 18 to 24 “experience certain severe types of harassment at disproportionately high levels,” especially on social media; about a quarter of them had been stalked online and had been victims of online sexual harassment.

Working to Halt Online Abuse, a nonprofit that fields online harassment complaints, says 72.5 percent of the cyberbullying incidents recorded from 2000-12 were reported by women. With Trump, too, it is women — and women’s bodies — that seem to be most viciously attacked.

His tweet at Brzezinski was clearly meant to humiliate a woman based on her appearance, first implying that she needed to improve her looks with plastic surgery and then evoking the image of her altered face, warped and bloodied. Trump has also described Rosie O’Donnell as “fat,” “dumb” and “a loser,” Arianna Huffington as“unattractive inside and out,” and Megyn Kelly as “average in every way.” During the campaign, he tweeted that Hillary Clinton “doesn’t even look presidential.”

The spectrum of online adolescent meanness is vast, but experts say that while girls are often targeted with rumor spreading and gossip — attacks on reputation — boys are emasculated.

A look at Trump’s most critical tweets, hundreds of which are documented in the New York Times’ list of “People, Places and Things Donald Trump has Insulted on Twitter,” show similar trends. Men are “sad” or “clowns" or “pathetic” or “dopey” or “weak.” Female journalists are “crazy” or “neurotic”; political opponents are “crooked” and “lying”; actresses like Meryl Streep, “overrated.”

Of course, Trump has targeted women offline, too. His tweets about Brzezinski reminded many of his suggestion on air that then-Fox News host Kelly had “blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.”

“To me the connection that matters between Megyn Kelly and Mika is that he has carnal impulse to denigrate women,” says Emily Bazelon, author of Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy. “Freud would have a field day.”

The Trump administration has vigorously denied that Trump’s tweets about Brzezinski were a form of bullying. At Thursday’s White House news conference, spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Trump’s tweets, instead, were retaliation—and that Trump himself was the victim. “The things this show has called him, not just him but numerous members of his staff ... are very deeply personal,” Sanders said. “It’s kind of like we’re living in 'The Twilight Zone.’”

But Trump isn’t in a position to be a victim of bullying, experts say. Bullies derive their strength from having more muscles, more friends or more followers—there is an inherently uneven power dynamic at play. “I don’t think anyone can argue that the president isn’t the most powerful person in any dynamic,” Patchin explains.

A bully and a president

That’s one big reason Trump is unlike any other cyberbully on the internet: Because he’s arguably the most important person in the world, more people listen to him, and his words can have far broader consequences than hurt feelings.

“Now it’s a huge set of headlines. … It's a huge distraction and kerfuffle,” Bazelon says. “It’s important both to recognize that Trump in some ways is a classic bully, and also that when you’re a bully and you’re the president, it’s very different.”

Another way in which Trump’s online behavior differs from typical cyberbullying? For most adults who practice cyberbullying, online anonymity gives them the liberty to be less mature, says Aboujaoude. “So cyberbullying isn’t just an expression of the aggression trait — it’s also an expression of the regression trait.” But Trump doesn’t, and can’t, usually go incognito — and it’s not clear he would want to, given his history of lobbing insults in speeches, interviews and other in-person appearances.

So, how can a cyberbully be stopped? In this case, can he? The answer isn’t just “take away his phone.” A bully’s power has everything to do with social status. If a community — a school, a Congress, a country — accepts and tolerates a bully’s actions, those actions usually continue. It’s only through social rejection that they are incentivized to stop.

“It’s not up to the victim of bullying to stop it or fight back,” explains Bazelon, drawing on her research about adolescent bullies and their victims. “It’s up to the community to make it clear to the bully that bullying is unacceptable. It’s on all of us.”

Last week, officials from both parties issued statements to that effect: House Speaker Paul Ryan, Republican senators such as Lindsey Graham and Susan Collins, and more.

But Bazelon argues that these “pro forma” statements, as she puts it, aren’t enough — the condemnation needs to come from closer to the president. Nicolle Wallace, an alumna of the George W. Bush administration and now a host on MSNBC, called on female members of the Trump administration like Dina Powell, Elaine Chao and Betsy DeVos to “work behind the scenes to educate” the president.

None of those women, nor anyone in the Trump family, however, has done so. Ivanka Trump was silent, and Melania Trump’s spokeswoman’s response was: “When her husband gets attacked, he will punch back 10 times harder.” What are our children supposed to glean from this, asks Patchin — “If someone bullies you, bully them worse?”

Brzezinski, for her part, has remained defiant. After losing her father in May, she says she has perspective on what really matters (not this). And as a public figure, she knows that her personal business can sometimes transform into public news. But the usual victims of cyberbullying attacks are younger, less famous and more vulnerable. It’s children who cyberbullying experts study, and who they’re most worried could be harmed by @realdonaldtrump’s tweets.

“What it’s doing is it’s teaching our children that this behavior is acceptable if it’s coming out of the White House,” Aftab says, pointing to a recent interaction she had with some Canadian fifth-graders in Prince Edward Island.

“I stood in front of them and said, ‘If someone is mean to you online, you have to be meaner back,’” an almost verbatim echo of Sanders’ and Melania Trump’s discourse. Aftab wanted to see how the kids would respond. “This one girl with bright red hair took her books from her lap and slammed them on the floor. She said, ‘No, it’s wrong, it’s just wrong!’ And I said, ‘Well, why is it wrong? We do it in New York.’ And she looked at me and said, ‘Well, this isn’t New York. This isn’t the United States of America. This is Canada, and we’re nice to people here.’”

Aftab laughed. “We need to listen to that fifth-grader and remind ourselves about what’s right and what’s wrong. … Feeding fire with fire just means you’re going to burn down the town.”